P4P800-Dlx success story...

Hi all,

I would like to just share a little success story with all these problems
posted regarding the P4P800 board around here. After researching for a
month and reading a lot of threads around here on this board - I trepidly
purchased it and planned to upgrade my old hulk of a monster P3-600Mhz 440BX
workhorse. I purchased the Asus P4P800-Dlx, Intel Pentium4 2.4c
Hyper-threaded 800Mhz FSB Retail boxed CPU and two sticks of Hynix
HY5DU56822BT-D43 512Mb DDR400 Dimms (as suggested by the Asus site listing).
This was cheap "no-name" Dimms at the local store and since I do not intend
on O.C. I think I am safe. I have a huge server tower which I had upgraded
the PS to an Enermax 365VE-FM 3 years ago so I was set to go. All went
without a hitch, in 3 hours I swapped out the components and got a bare
system up and running (MB, CPU, Memory and Video) and ran MemTest86
overnight - actually most of that time was spent vacuuming out my old case
(it can get pretty dusty) and carefully laying and folding the ribbon cables
so that they were neat and out-of-the way to improve air circulation - and
all tested out OK. I then hooked up the old HDD and performed a WinXP
Repair Install to load the correct drivers for my new MB without losing my
old programs and settings (I know most would recommend a clean new install -
but I had so much customizations...). Everything went perfectly without a
hitch - I must recommend Mr. Steveo's guide at:
http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showth...threadid=34558 which helped
me emmensely. I then spent the next few hours pluggin in my other HDDs and
PCI peripherals. I then flashed my BIOS to 1007. The only hiccup was when
I upgraded to 1007, the memtest program hung on testing (it worked on the
1005 straight out of the box) - but the rest of the system was entirely
stable. I have now since learned that the new 1008 bios will address this
issue (I have yet to flash up to this yet) I am happy to report that as of
1 week ago - all has been up and running and extremely stable - and FAST! I
might even tempt fate and try a little O.C. or playing with the RAM a bit -
but first I'll flash to 1008.

With all these problems posted around here, I just wanted to recommend this
board - its usual to post problems and seek help in these NGs but I hope for
those of you considering this board, this posting makes up for some of this
rather 1 sided picture. No I do not work for Asus, and I was a very happy
Abit BX6 owner before this - I am very pro-Asus now, however, I have yet to
deal with their customer service department. My only beef is that I wish
they'd included brackets that had the gameport, SPDIF or additional USB
ports for all the headers that they included on the motherboard and that
VoicePost would work with add-on audio cards.

The only problem I have now is that the ATI TV Wonder TV Tuner Application
freezes when I exit or quit - but this was discovered to be a fault with the
ATI TV Tuner application and HyperThreading (with it disabled the
application closed properly). Lets hope ATI comes up with a patch or fix.
At least it's not the P4P800's fault.

Thanks,
William
---------
Asus P4P800-D + P4 2.4c HT
2x Hynix 512Mb DDR400
ATI Radeon 9000Pro (Cat3.4)
ATI TV Wonder (MMC7.9)
Adaptec AHA-2930U SCSI
Creative Soundblaster Live! MP3+
WD 120Gb JB (Pri-master)
Quantum 32Gb (Pri-slave)
LiteOn 52x24x52 (Sec-master)
Pioneer A05s DVD (Sec-slave)
Quantum 6.4Gb (VIA-master)
IBM 4.2Gb (SCSI)
Zip100 SCSI+SyQuest5200 SCSI
Enermax 365VE-FM PS
Windows XP Professional (SP-1a)

William Cheng @HSE wrote:

[following his success story:]

....
but first I'll flash to 1008.
....

I could tell a similar success story (and kept my P3B-F PIII600E@800
rig as second for WLAN and other experiments) but I immediately
flashed to BIOS 1008.004 beta (using the afudos.exe from the Asus web
site, not from the CD) trusting in the general observation in this NG
that Asus' beta Bios tend to turn out as final ones... no probs so far.

Roy